How To Increase “C” Drive Partition Space Without Formatting

Are you running out of space in your “C” Drive where you have installed the Windows operating system? Would you like to know how to increase the partition space of “C” drive or any drive which is serving as the primary partition? Well, then you are in the right place.

Here, I am gonna teach you the process of increasing the primary partition space without formatting your entire Hard disk. Just follow the steps given here carefully.

NOTE: I have created this tutorial using my Windows machine which is running on Windows 7 operating system. If you are using Windows 8 or Windows Vista or any other Windows OS, you can follow the same tutorial given here for increasing partition space.

Increase “C” Drive Partition Space Without Formatting

1) To get started, go to your Control Panel and click on “Administrative Tools“.

2) A new window will open up, showing shortcuts for a lot of applications (just like the screenshot given below).

3) Now, click on “Computer Management” option and a new Window will open up showing three main options: System Tools, Storage, and Services and Applications.

4) Next, click on the “Disk Management” option in “Storage“. Now you will see all the Partition of your Windows machine.

5) As you can see from the screenshot above, “C” drive is the primary partition. So, to increase its space, you have to Shrink the volume size of the next available partition. You can do that by right clicking on the partition in the Disk Management window and select “Shrink Volume“.

6) Based on your requirement, you can choose the amount of space to shrink.

7) Once you have done that, click on “Shrink” and the space will be shrinked, which will be available as “Unallocated Space“.

8) Now, select the partition for which you would like to increase the space and choose the “Extend Volume” option (you will get this option by right clicking on mouse). You will see the “Extend Volume Wizard“. Just follow the on-screen instructions and you will be able to finish the process without any errors.

9) Once done, you will see the “Unallocated Space” adding to the primary partition space.

That’s it. Now you have successfully increased the partition space of “C” drive or primary partition without using the applications available in Windows Operating system. If you encounter any issues while following this tutorial, drop a comment below and I will get back to you with a solution within 24-48 hours.

Comments

thanks for the tutorial. A little problem though, i got as far as shrinking volume on D. but there is no “extend volume ” option , when i right-click on drive C, whose volume is to be increased. that option comes as grey. can you help on this?

1) Free up space to the immediate right of the C drive, in what I am presuming is your D drive.

You can either:

a) move all the data from D to another partition or disk, or b) if there is more tha 50% free in D you can shrink it, create a new partition in the newly created space, and move the data from D to the new partition. (thereby moving all the data rightwards)

2) Delete the now empty D drive.

3) Extend the C drive as far as you wish into the newly created space.

4) Tidy up by following similar steps to create space and amalgamate into the drive structure you want.

The answer for your question "C: drive partition cannot be extended. The 'extend' option is always greyed out for C:" :

This is because drive can only be extended to the left.. the resulting drive must be contiguous on your disk. You cannot extend by leapfrogging over a space that is already taken with another partition! There is a (somewhat tedious) workaround which involves no additional software, in which I am assuming: a) Your C drive is the Operating (booting) drive, and is in the leftmost position. b) You have only files in the other partitions, ie not whole operating systems. c) You have significant free space on your drive to play with and no rediculously sized files that fill entire drives. What you need to do essentially is move the unallocated space over to the right hand side of the drive you want to extend. The extend option will then be available. To do this, you need to shrink the partition that is currently there down to the size you wish to extend by, and then MOVE THE DATA IN IT ESLEWHERE! This is the tedious part. You can then delete the empty partition and extend the C drive into the unallocated space. Similar shrink, copy, paste, extend operations can be carried out to get the remaining drives where you want them. Labourious, yes, but worth it to get your structure the way you want. Reminds me a bit of the old Tower of Hanoi game you used to see on mobile phones in the old days… Word of caution: you may need to move the recovery partition and I am not sure whether the result will still work. Windows 8 is pretty good at working out these issues though, and you can always wipe and re-make the recovery.